How many Miles to the Kilojoule?
‘You are what you eat’, they say.
Most Granny Smith customers are committed organic customers and you each have your own reasons for choosing organic: health, environmental, nutritional, superior taste and even social reasons. It’s a complicated field when it comes to what to eat and what to feed our families.
Focusing on the environmental aspect of organic foods for a moment gives pause to consider some of the wider ramifications of how we eat. Within the social and environmental what-to-eat check boxes is the issue of how far our food has travelled to get from the farm to our forks. Why? Because ‘food miles’ are costly. With fuel prices rising ever higher, organics’ advantage in terms of less artificial fertilisers and pesticides (which use fossil fuels to manufacture them) need to be balanced by the amount of fuel needed to transport the products to market.
I’ve always been keen on the environmental and political implications of our diets. If you care about the world around us, I don’t know how you couldn’t be. After all, we put food in our mouths three or more times a day and each mouthful carries an impact on, and a responsibility for Mother Earth.
However that said, food shouldn’t be a fraught issue and a battle of mind and stomach every time we want to eat. Hey, if you’re going to enjoy a sticky, deep-fried, pink icing-clad doughnut occasionally, go ahead and just enjoy it. Don’t agonize about it. Let me do the Big Picture agonizing for you! But since you do eat, you want to make sure that most of your little mouthfuls add up to something worthwhile for your health and for the planet’s. And sure, enjoyment is a very valuable reason to eat something; you just need to gently keep the bigger picture in mind without losing sleep about it. In fact for me, that bigger picture is certainly one reason I enjoy something like raddicchio or dandelion leaves in my salad. They’re bitter but bitter can be healthy so I get enjoyment from knowing that too.
Recently I finished a book called Plenty: One Man, One Woman and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, by Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon. A young Vancouver couple, they decided to eat only food produced within a hundred miles of their inner-urban home for an entire year. The story is a wonderful account of the good humour required to make this decision work and their adventures in discovering small and often hidden food trails that made the journey rewarding and exciting. See more at www.100milediet.org
While reading their story, I kept thinking how lucky we are in Sydney, in that a similar dietary “limit” imposed on someone living in this region should, in fact, offer a diet of great interest and variety. It would be relatively easy to achieve and far less challenging than a couple living in chilly, wet Vancouver. After all, 100 miles is 160 km: as the crow flies, that takes us to Nelson Bay (lovely tomatoes), south beyond Nowra (rolling dairy country), south west to around Goulburn and Crookwell (potato country) and west to almost Bathurst (crisp apples, stonefruit and other cool climate delights). Of course 160 km east of Sydney takes in a lot of fishing ground. In between these points are dairies and wineries, orchards, market gardens, mushroom farms, meat producers and fisherfolk; such variety, so fortunate.
Given the issues I wrestle with in regard to the rights and “less rights” of different ways of eating, I’ve decided to increase awareness about how we eat and hopefully encourage the idea of eating local foods. So we’re now putting on our fruit and vege price tickets the number of kilometres the item has travelled to get to Granny Smith Natural Food Market. While Sydney is a food bowl, it’s interesting to note how far things need to travel and what that means.
The kilometre number indicates the most direct road route between the farm and East Wahroonga. In fact each item will have travelled further than that because it often needs to be transshipped somewhere and then heads mostly for the Sydney Markets at Flemington, where yours truly carefully inspects it, picks it up and brings it back to the shop.
And what does this reveal about organic food? Given that there is no-one else offering this information, which would allow comparison with conventionally-grown produce, I was really surprised to see the big numbers. Most of our organic food in Sydney comes from about 1,000 km. Really? I was amazed. A thousand kilometres is a truly long-distance to get something that could easily grow somewhere within our 160 km radius. Where did the organic 100 mile diet possibilities go to? Yet more food agonizing for me to take on …
Organic shops in Melbourne tap into the cluster of organic farms in Victoria, keeping their food miles’ impact down. Of course a Melbournian’s bananas would travel further (2,800 km versus “only” 1,800 km to Sydney) but they’d be decently compensated for by the number of local organic growers of nearly everything else. There’s even an historic organic apple and pear orchard in Melbourne suburbia. Brisbane is in an even more enviable position with almost wall-to-wall organic farms stretching from north-east NSW all the way to the Sunshine Coast and beyond. Adelaide is well served by local organic growers, in spite of the continuing pressure of drought. But what is it about Sydney? Why can I only name a few suppliers, despite of years of sourcing?
Adding food miles’ impact to your dietary considerations should lead to a more seasonal diet. Zucchini and eggplant, for example, won’t grow outdoors in the local Sydney region in cooler months. And local food should result in less packaging, less trucks on highways and produce picked closer to optimal ripeness.
